Elliott Erwitt, whose photos are famous and often funny, dies at the age of 95

Photographers with a comic view of life rarely receive the praise accorded to nature glorifiers or chroniclers of war and misery. Elliott Erwitt, who died Wednesday at his Manhattan home at the age of 95, was an exception.

For more than sixty years he used his camera to tell visual jokes and find material wherever he walked. His keen eye for silly, sometimes meaningful conjunctions – a dog lying on its back in a cemetery, a glowing Coca-Cola machine amid a public rocket demonstration in Alabama, a mangy potted plant in a tacky Miami Beach ballroom – consistently gave him assignments. as well as the affection of an audience that shared his sweet, Chaplin-esque sense of the absurd.

He published more than twenty books and his black and white prints are in photography collections around the world. His daughter Sasha Erwitt confirmed the death.

Most celebrated for his witty snapshots of dogs, published in books with titles such as “Son of Bitch,” “To the Dogs” and “Woof,” Mr. Erwitt captured them as solitary animals with their own obsessions, but also as personal interactions with people.

In an essay for Mr Erwitt’s ‘Dogs Dogs’, PG Wodehouse wrote: ‘There is not a sitter in his gallery that does not melt the heart, nor a beastly class distinction. Thoroughbreds and mutts, they’re all there.’

The popularity of Mr. Erwitt’s candids obscured the diversity of his work. He never specialized and always worked as a freelancer. A lifelong member and former president of Magnum, the esteemed collective of independent photographers — its co-founder, Robert Capa, invited him to join in 1953 — Mr. Erwitt took on all kinds of assignments, from fashion to politics

He photographed celebrities (Humphrey Bogart, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara) for Life, Look and other magazines, and did travel campaigns for Ireland and France.

A number of his images became famous. One of his most famous shows a veiled Jacqueline Kennedy holding a folded American flag during President John F. Kennedy’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in 1963.

Even more famous is one from 1959, in which Vice President Richard M. Nixon stabbed Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in the chest during the so-called Kitchen Debate at an exhibition of American products in Moscow. (The photo was made into a poster by Republicans during the 1960 campaign, infuriating the staunchly anti-Nixon Mr. Erwitt. “It was used without my permission,” he later said. “I was angry, but I couldn’t do anything do. about it.”)

Another memorable photograph, from Edward Steichen’s landmark photographic exhibition ‘The Family of Man’ (and subsequent book) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was entitled ‘Mother and Child’. The photo, taken in 1953, shows a woman on a bed looking into her baby’s eyes, while a cat coolly watches the scene. The baby was Mr Erwitt’s daughter, Ellen, and the woman was his first wife, Lucienne Matthews, who died in 2011.

Museums exhibited his work from the 1960s until his death, and over the years he hosted one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Barbican in London . In 2002, an extensive retrospective exhibition took place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Elio Romano Ervitz (“Romano, because my father had once studied at the University of Rome” and “liked it”) was born in Paris on July 26, 1928, the son of a Russian Orthodox Jew (there were many Talmudic scholars in his book ). family) and his Russian wife. They had fled to France after the 1917 revolution.

In an autobiographical essay in his book ‘Personal Exposures’ (1988), Mr Erwitt wrote that his father, Boris, had never lost faith in socialism and his wife Eugenia (Trepel) Erwitt (’embarrassingly rich as a young girl’) “, for the couple’s exodus from “the Promised Land of the Soviet paradise.”

After moving the family to Italy, his father found Mussolini’s regime intolerable and brought everyone back to France in 1938. Although Boris and Eugenia had separated in Milan when their son was four, the three left together on a boat for the United States a year later. , a few days before World War II started.

Elio Ervitz became Elliott Erwitt in New York, but continued his wandering life. After living for two years with his salesman father on Manhattan’s Central Park West, father and son drove across the country to Los Angeles in 1941, the two selling wristwatches in small towns to pay their way.

A few years later his father left again, this time selling his wares in New Orleans and leaving his 16-year-old son to fend for himself. Boris later traveled to Japan to be there ordained as a Buddhist priest and returned to practice his adopted religion in Manhattan.

Mr. Erwitt attributed his “shyness” — having arrived in New York without speaking English — to his appointment as photographer. He started taking photographs seriously at age 16 in Los Angeles with an antique glass-plate camera, then switched to a Rolleiflex.

“My dentist was my first customer, then people’s houses and children, then the prom,” he wrote. Photos of movie stars also sold well.

After graduating from Hollywood High School, he studied photography at Los Angeles City College, took a job in a commercial darkroom and rushed for work. In 1949, he returned to New York, where he met Capa and Steichen, studied film at the New School for Social Research, and enjoyed a nascent professional career before being drafted by the Army during the Korean War.

While serving in an Army Signal Corps unit in France in 1951, he took a photo of soldiers killing time in the barracks. According to his story, the photo changed his life. By submitting it to a Life Magazine competition, he won a prize and the photo was published as ‘Bed and Boredom’. With the $2,500 check (“an astronomical sum at the time”), Mr. Erwitt bought a car and nicknamed it “Thanks, Henry,” after Time-Life publisher Henry Luce.

The unheroic and the unusual had already become characteristic motifs for Mr. Erwitt. He took his first dog-related photos in 1946, for a fashion story about women’s shoes for The New York Times Magazine.

One image from that assignment, of a panting Chihuahua in a sweater on the sidewalk next to a woman in sandals, was featured in many exhibitions.

“I decided to shoot from a dog’s perspective because dogs see more shoes than anyone else,” he reasoned.

Mr. Erwitt tended to use a view camera for advertising assignments, reserving his 35 millimeter for personal shooting. Henri Cartier-Bresson was among many who were surprised that his friend could do both types of work so easily.

“Elliott has, in my opinion, achieved a miracle,” Mr. Cartier-Bresson once said, “by working on a series of commercial campaigns and still offering a bouquet of stolen photographs with a touch, a smile of his deeper self.”

Mr. Erwitt spoke four languages, an ability that enabled him to find regular work in Europe in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and enjoyed the freelance life.

“Some people can’t stand uncertainty, but it’s never bothered me too much,” he wrote in 1988, adding that his unstable income stream was harder on his wives and girlfriends than on him.

Mr. Erwitt was married and divorced four times: to Lucienne Van Kan, from 1953 to 1960; to Diana Dann, from 1967 to 1974; to Susan Ringo, from 1977 to 1984; and to Pia Frankenberg, from 1998 to 2012.

In addition to his daughter Sasha, from his third marriage, he is survived by another daughter from that marriage, Amelia Erwitt; two daughters from his first marriage, Ellen and Jennifer Erwitt; two sons from his first marriage, Misha and David; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for about 60 years.

In the 1970s, Mr. Erwitt was among the first to capitalize on the art market’s interest in contemporary photographs as investments. Real estate agents bought prints in bulk for tax shelters. “That windfall bought my house in East Hampton,” he said.

‘Photographs and Anti-Photographs’, published in 1972, was the first in a series of Erwitt books. During this time he also produced and directed a series of short film documentaries: “The Many Faces of Dustin Hoffman” (1968), “Beauty Knows No Pain” (1971), “Red, White and Bluegrass” (1973), “The Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan” (1977) and “The Magnificent Marching 100” (1980). He continued to make films into the 1980s, producing a series of 18 short comedies for HBO.

But his crazy and deft photography will undoubtedly be his best-remembered legacy. Besides dogs, nudity excited him, and he found as much material on public beaches as on the streets. The human comedy activated his eye, even as he struggled to explain his viewing process.

“You can take a picture of the most beautiful situation and it’s lifeless, nothing comes through,” he noted. “Then you can take a picture of nothing, of someone scratching their nose, and it turns out to be a great picture.”

The gentle humor of his photographs did not prevent him from taking a brusquely anti-intellectual stance on what he did.

He was wary of interpretation. “I generally don’t think too much,” he wrote. “I certainly don’t use those funny words that museum people and art critics like.”

He believed that photography was “a lazy man’s profession,” requiring only “modest skills.” The mystery of how he did what he did couldn’t be explained, even by himself, and that seemed to please him. He concluded that “ideas, however wonderfully entertaining they may be in conversation and seduction, have little to do with photography.”

Richard B. Woodward, a longtime art and photography critic in New York, died in April. Alex Traub contributed reporting.